


this only truth

by greenbirds



Category: Dragonriders of Pern - Anne McCaffrey
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:13:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,383
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141320
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/greenbirds/pseuds/greenbirds
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sometimes the wisdom of dragons is the best cure for melancholy.</p>
            </blockquote>





	this only truth

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Macdragon](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Macdragon/gifts).



_seeker of truth_

 _follow no path  
all paths lead where_

 _truth is here  
-e.e. cummings_

###

 

Turn’s End again. New Year’s tomorrow, and a few days after, it would be That Day again, as P’tero had come to think of it. (He’d say he liked to think of it that way, but he didn’t like to think of it at all.) Like Threadfall, it was inevitable, and like Threadfall, it always came back, sure as the world turned, sure as the moons rose.

This would be the fifth anniversary of That Day (but who’s counting?).

 _You are brooding,_ blue Ormonth observed mildly, lifting his great head from his paws. His eyes whirled gently, blue-green with concern for his rider. _You have been brooding all day. You should go back to the party. Then you would be brood less_.

“It’s not that simple, Ormonth,” P’tero moaned, sinking down beside his dragon on an empty corner of Ormonth’s couch.

What is not simple about it? The blue wanted to know. _You are happy when you are around happy people. There are happy people at the party. You should go._

Sounds of happy celebration filtered into the weyr from the chamber beyond. P’tero could hear Z’gal’s deep voice, T’sen laughing. Someone had brought out a gitar and was playing it with no more than moderate skill but very great enthusiasm. M’leng was singing along, loudly.

 _Sith says that M’leng is also at the party,_ P’tero’s dragon offered helpfully.

“I can hear that, silly,” P’tero laughed. “I think they can hear him in Southern Boll.”

M’leng had talented hands and a beautiful body, but M’leng had never been much of a harper: just now he was singing off-key and he could only seem to remember half the words. He mumbled what he couldn’t remember, and sang the rest of the words at the top of his voice. (Whatever he was singing – and the tune was so garbled P’tero couldn’t be sure, though it might be a parody of one of the new teaching songs – it clearly wasn’t a song for sharing with children; the words that he could make out involved rods and knobs and other things that would have made P’tero’s sisters blush to the tips of their ears).

For a moment, P’tero felt an involuntary smile tug at the corners of his lips.

 _M’leng makes you happy. You make him happy. Why are you still here when he is there?_

Had Ormonth been a human, P’tero would have asked him if he didn’t remember what day it was, what time of Turn it was, what had happened on that awful day five Turns before. But dragons weren’t humans. Dragons had no sense of time.

To a dragon, there was only an endless now, and somewhere in the shadows the faintest stirrings of Before and After.

(Dragons, P’tero thought absently stroking his blue’s eye ridge, were lucky.)

Ormonth knew about That Day, of course, because his rider remembered it (How could P’tero forget That Day, with Iantine’s painting hanging where he could saw it first thing every morning before he’d even had his morning klah? How could he forget it, after the scars the lion’s claws had left in M’leng shoulder? The scars felt like tiny twisted ropes under P’tero’s fingers, flaws in his lover’s otherwise perfect skin, flaws that would not be there but for P’tero’s carelessness), but the blue would never know it as P’tero did.

Ormonth would never be tormented by visions of a great tawny paw and razor sharp claws, would never wake gasping from a nightmare filled with great cats who pulled M’leng from his arms and dragged his lover (his beautiful lover, with his fine bones and almond-shaped green eyes) into the darkness.

(When P’tero had nightmares, they were filled with the sharp rich green scent of sun-warmed grass.)

Last year at Turn’s End, while they lay twined together in M’leng’s sleeping furs, warm with good Benden wine and the pleasant lassitude that followed an evening of celebration and a few hours spent making love, M’leng had traced the scars on the backs of P’tero’s legs delicately with small, callused fingers.

“I’ll never understand why you’re so embarrassed by these scars, ‘Tero,” M’leng had murmured against P’tero’s neck in the darkness, his breath a pleasantly warm contrast to the midwinter chill of the room. “They’re marks of honor, really. And I will tell you every day how much I love them.”

M’leng was as good as his word (as always, and after this many Turns, P’tero expected nothing less). And M’leng’s declarations of love for P’tero’s scars (on one memorable night they’d been rendered in well-meant but truly terrible verse) were, of course, the last thing P’tero wanted to hear.

M’leng believed him a hero, thought P’tero had flung himself across his lover’s body in an act of protection, of self-sacrifice. M’leng believed P’tero had made an offering of himself to the lions. M’leng had been unconscious. M’leng did not know the truth.

 _Sith says her rider wonders where you are,_ Ormonth broke in, and P’tero could practically hear the exasperated sigh in his blue’s voice. _And you are still sitting here brooding._ Beside him, Ormonth’s eye, still blue-green, whirled a bit faster.

P’tero knew what would come of going back to the party (back to T’sen and Z’gal and whoever else had wandered past and been drawn into the orbit their little celebration, back to the wine and the biscuits and the card games for silly trinkets and various and sundry attempts -- of varying degrees of ineptitude -- to play the harper). He knew because it had happened every Turn’s End since That Day:

M’leng would cheer P’tero’s entrance, would make much of him, would make outrageous toasts to P’tero’s heroism and shower him with kisses.

M’leng would call him a hero.

 _M’leng loves you,_ Ormonth pointed out.

When she was nursing him in the aftermath of That Day, Tisha (Tisha who was always so full of kindness and laughter) had told P’tero that M’leng would see P’tero’s scars only as a sign of what P’tero had endured to save him. Marks of honor. Something to take pride in.

Tisha didn’t know the truth either.

“I didn’t do anything, Ormonth,” P’tero said miserably. “It was all an accident. I wasn’t a hero; I was just in the way.”

(In Iantine’s painting, P’tero, fully clad, had flung himself bravely across his lover’s body, first upraised to strike the nearest lion, his face defiant. The colors and the details were as vivid as life, but they weren’t perfect: that wasn’t the way it had happened at all.)

 _Does it matter_? Ormonth asked.

P’tero broke off scratching Ormonth’s eye ridge to sit bolt upright and sputter, “Of course it matters! M’leng thinks I’m a hero, and I’m not. I didn’t protect him; I just happened to be laying on top of him because we’d been –“ (They had been making love in the tall grass, so absorbed in each other they hadn’t heard the cats approaching. P’tero had only protected M’leng by accident.)

 _Would you protect him on purpose?_

“Of course I would!” The words were out of P’tero’s mouth without his even having to think about them. “I love him! I’d throw myself in front of Thread for him., you know that! I’d –“

P’tero closed his mouth then, realizing the next words out of his mouth would have been, “I’d fight a lion,” realizing he meant it with every fiber of his being.

He’d fight _ten_ lions. (P’tero was not sorry he had been in the way. He had not meant to be in the way, but he was not sorry at all).

 _There you are then,_ Ormonth said smugly. _You love him. He loves you. You will protect him if he needs it. That is all the truth you need.,_

M’leng was waiting with an embrace and a warm smile full of promise when P’tero went back to the party, andthis time, when M’leng made the usual outrageous toast (accompanied by the traditional mixture of cheers and good-natured groans), P’tero smiled.

Turn’s End again. New Year’s tomorrow, and a few days after, it would be That Day again, and P’tero and M’leng were still alive to celebrate it.

Thanks to an accident. 


End file.
